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Bonn End of a Gang?

The recent arrest of two men and a woman believed to be the last of the chieftains of the Red Army faction has put an official end to the era of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the high priests of sociological terrorism in postwar Germany. The Red Army faction sprang from the ranks of middleclass university students who, saturated with ideology, sought revenge on the Nazi past and on the bourgeois conformity and complacency of the 1970s. Systematic assassinations and large-scale robberies were their tools, paralleling the stillactive Red Brigades in Italy. Now that the last of their known leaders have been caught, the German public and the German police are looking forward to a spell of relief. Much credit goes to Horst Herold, former chief of the West German Criminal Investigation Bureau, a unit specially organized to hunt terrorists. Herold, known as Big Brother, employed three thousand specialists who fed millions of facts into computers about almost everyone involved in left-wing activities, including details of how they traveled and what library books they borrowed. A new category of “possible suspect” was created that, along with such attractions as million-mark rewards for making a denunciation, created a “manhunt” atmosphere that disturbed some. A change of political attitude, however, has also played its part in the decline of terrorism in Germany. The universities today are no longer the incubators of violence they once were. Activists tend to expend their energies in causes such as the ecological or pacifist movements, and even to ally themselves with the traditional political parties. Nevertheless, the police are not relaxing completely. In 1982, there were 57 attacks against American personnel and property in the Federal Republic, and more than one hundred groups were identified as “revolutionary cells.” For terrorism, it may only be a holiday.

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Bonn End of a Gang?

The recent arrest of two men and a woman believed to be the last of the chieftains of the Red Army faction has put an official end to the era of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the high priests of sociological terrorism in postwar Germany. The Red Army faction sprang from the ranks of middleclass university students who, saturated with ideology, sought revenge on the Nazi past and on the bourgeois conformity and complacency of the 1970s. Systematic assassinations and large-scale robberies were their tools, paralleling the stillactive Red Brigades in Italy. Now that the last of their known leaders have been caught, the German public and the German police are looking forward to a spell of relief. Much credit goes to Horst Herold, former chief of the West German Criminal Investigation Bureau, a unit specially organized to hunt terrorists. Herold, known as Big Brother, employed three thousand specialists who fed millions of facts into computers about almost everyone involved in left-wing activities, including details of how they traveled and what library books they borrowed. A new category of “possible suspect” was created that, along with such attractions as million-mark rewards for making a denunciation, created a “manhunt” atmosphere that disturbed some. A change of political attitude, however, has also played its part in the decline of terrorism in Germany. The universities today are no longer the incubators of violence they once were. Activists tend to expend their energies in causes such as the ecological or pacifist movements, and even to ally themselves with the traditional political parties. Nevertheless, the police are not relaxing completely. In 1982, there were 57 attacks against American personnel and property in the Federal Republic, and more than one hundred groups were identified as “revolutionary cells.” For terrorism, it may only be a holiday.